The figure in the reflection did not move. It looks faded and faint in the light, a human-shaped void in the air behind him, more a pressure on the back of his neck than an image. Kaizoo didn't dare turn. He knew, deep in his heart and mind, that if he saw the figure behind him, he would lose his sanity. He would look like a madman.

He was staring into a crack in reality itself, and the abyss was staring back with his own eyes.

His own face in the console was a pale, wide-eyed mask of terror—a perfect portrait of a man witnessing his own ghost.

Then, a low oxygen alarm chimed, soft and patronizing.

“Oxygen levels at 10%. Carbon dioxide building beyond recommended thresholds. Recommend cognitive function check,” LUNA stated, her voice a sterile scalpel slicing through the tension.

The announcement yanked him back from the edge. The figure vanished. Kaizoo spun his chair around, his chest heaving. He stood and scanned the cabin, searching for any glimpse, any evidence, until a bone-deep chill settled in him. But the cabin was empty. The air itself had changed, thickened into something he couldn't explain.

A wave of dizziness slammed into him, a vertigo of the soul. The serene blue console lights smeared across his vision like wet watercolor, bleeding into grotesque shapes. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying for the ordered world of wires and circuits to return.

When he opened them, the co-pilot's seat was occupied.

Slumped in the chair was another Kaizoo. His head was bowed in an attitude of profound exhaustion or grief, his hands resting palms-up on his knees. He was identical in every detail, down to the small, healing cut on his bicep from a careless moment with a servo-panel days—or was it lifetimes?—ago.

"No. No, No, No," Kaizoo’s heart hammered against his ribs. He stepped back until the cold hull pressed against his spine. This wasn't the external phantom from the console. This was an internal fracture, a tumor of the self. "You're not real," he whispered, the sound scraping from his raw throat like a confession. "You're a CO2 hallucination. Just a hallucination from lack of oxygen. This is all in my head. What I see is not real. The recording said , Don't believe the voices. Don't believe it. I'm sure what I saw wasn't real either and was just a trick of my mind. Don't believe it."

The other Kaizoo didn't look up. His shoulders, a perfect mirror of his own, began to shake. A silent, mocking laughter that was infinitely worse than any sound.

"What if I'm not hallucinating?" The thought was a poison dart, striking deeper than any whisper. "What if I never left the Okeanex-03? What if my body is still strapped in that dead cockpit, and this is just the final, frantic dream of a brain dying in the dark? Or worse… what if I'm just insane? A broken thing they sent down here to be forgotten? The headless engineer, the walking corpses… were they all just projections of a mind coming undone? Was the monster with my face merely the first true glimpse of my own fractured soul?"

His chest heaved, his words spilling out as if he could convince himself through sheer repetition. The solid ground of reality was dissolving into a nightmare sea, and he was drowning in the quicksand of his own perception. The only thing left was the raw, desperate, animal need to prove he was real. To leave a mark that proved Kaizoo had been here, that he had existed as a coherent being, if only for a moment.

He lunged for the console, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. He slapped his hand on the log recorder, fumbling for the activation rune. The red "recording" light blinked on, a single, accusing eye in the gloom.

"Log entry! Voice authorization, Kaizoo!" he yelled, his voice cracking. He had to hear himself. He had to externalize the chaos, make it real outside the prison of his own skull. To build a dam of words against the silent tide of madness. "I'm… I'm cataloguing a systems failure. The system is me. CO2 is high. I'm seeing… myself. I'm hearing things. But the file, my own past self, said not to believe them. So which part of me do I trust? The one screaming now, or the one who whispered a warning from the past? The me of then, or the me of now? Where does the real Kaizoo begin and end?"

He glanced, furtively, at the co-pilot's seat.

It was empty.

A sob of raw, unadulterated relief caught in his throat, so powerful it was almost painful. He had talked it away. He had asserted his reality. He had fixed the glitch with the sheer force of his will.

"See? It's gone. It was just the air. It was just the pressure. I'm still here. I'm still Kaizoo. I diagnose, I repair, I solve. And I just solved that. I controlled the variable." He would not fight the dark, but keep talking, to keep building a wall of words and logic against the silence. To keep himself sane and running, no matter how hard the situation. "I have to keep moving forward and keep myself sane," he said with confidence and clarity. But for how long?

"Maybe… maybe I'm not crazy," he continued, the words pouring out in a frantic, triumphant prayer to the unfeeling recorder. "Maybe this is a test. A cruel, beautiful experiment. They put us down here, the engineers, to see how long we last. To see what breaks first—the titanium hull or the human spirit. We're lab rats in a labyrinth at the bottom of the world, and the Minotaur is our own mind. Or maybe… maybe I'm already dead, and this is some kind of digital purgatory. A simulation running on a loop, punishing me for a sin I can't remember. A ghost haunting a machine."

He spoke until his throat was raw and his voice was a hoarse whisper. He confessed every fear, every paranoid theory, every fragmented memory that felt like it belonged to someone else. He wove the entire, horrifying tapestry of his existence into the cold, unfeeling memory of the Nautilus. He was building a monument to his own sanity, by desperate, verbal brick.

When he finally stopped, spent and trembling, he felt hollowed out, but scoured clean. Purged. He had anchored himself in the recording. It was proof. He was here. He spoke. He real. Not hallucinating.

His hand, now steady, saved the file. He labeled it FINAL LOG - THE TRUTH?. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the first that felt truly his in hours. For the first time since the abyss had stared back with his own face, he felt a sliver of peace. It was fragile, thin as glass, but it was there. He had looked into the crack and tried to repair it, to preserve it, to stay strong and keep himself from cracking and crumbling.

---

A feeling of calm arrived like a tranquil sea, but it was as fleeting as sea foam. Then the sea became something unexpected and unpredictable—a wave and a tsunami that came uninvited and unanticipated

A new, insidious need bloomed in the hollow space his panic had left behind. He needed to see it. To witness his own triumph. To watch the recording and see himself, Kaizoo the Victor, conquering his wills. He needed the visual confirmation, the final seal on his victory.

He opened the video log he had just created, his finger hovering over the 'play' icon.

The video played. There he was, pale and wild-eyed, a sign of hope and salvation to himself. It was harrowing, raw, and ugly. But it was real. It was him. He had done it.

His eyes, almost against his will, drifted from his own tormented face to the space behind him. To the shadowy recess near the bunk.

And he saw it.

It wasn't in a reflection. It wasn't a trick of the light. It was in the room with him, captured in immutable, digital data.

A figure.

Tall and unnaturally thin, its form seeming to absorb the light, a silhouette cut from the fabric of the abyss itself. It wasn't the shimmering phantom from the console. This was solid. Tangible. It stood perfectly still, its posture one of calm, almost clinical observation.

And it was watching him.

As Kaizoo-on-the-screen ranted about simulations and purgatory, the figure in the background took a single, silent, deliberate step forward, its head tilting with a detached, almost academic curiosity. It was studying him.

Kaizoo froze the playback. His heart stuttered, missed a beat, and then began to pound a frantic, panicked rhythm against his ribs. The breath in his lungs turned to ice.

Panic surged through his veins, a toxic cocktail of heat and ice. His chest was a dying star, ready to implode. His brain short-circuited, unable to process the violation. His hands and legs trembled uncontrollably. His breath came in ragged, insufficient gasps. Sweat poured from him as if a dam had burst, flowing freely like water from an unclogged drain. The very air felt wrong, a tormenting pressure on his skin.

Then, a psychic backlash—a violent surge of conflicting, corrupted memories—detonated in his skull. It felt like a spike being driven through his temples. A woman's voice, strangled and digital, stuttered through his mind: "Rem...me...mem....berr everythingg.. yourhhhj.. traunjvngg... Foruegghn..." Then, a sudden, vicious clarity that was somehow worse: "Be... Caaldeeaddd...lmmmmm.." The voice twisted, warping mid-syllable into a guttural roar: "BE DEAD KAIZOO.."

"Aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, STOPPP ITTTTT!!!!" he screamed, clawing at his temples as if he could physically tear the invading voices from his head. His vision swam, the cabin tilting on its axis.

Then, as suddenly as the assault came, a different memory surfaced, clear and potent. A vision flashed, clear and brutal: himself in a grey training suit, a woman beside him in an identical uniform. But the scene was wrong, horrible. The woman was on her knees, her head forced down, the cold, blue muzzle of a pulse rifle pressed against her temple. Her voice, calm yet final, echoed: "Face the reality". "KA...." He heard his own younger voice scream a name—her name—a single, vital syllable that was erased by a burst of static.

He opened his eyes. His body was drenched, sweat raining onto the console and floor, but his mind was preternaturally calm. The storm had passed, leaving a devastating, crystalline clarity. The pain was gone. The fear was… managed. He was a machine now, running a final diagnostic.

"I have to face the reality," he whispered to his own shattered reflection in the dark glass of the screen. His voice was flat, devoid of all emotion. "I have to confirm it with my own eyes."

The conclusion was inescapable. He had not been alone. The presence was not a hallucination. It was here, on the ship, a physical passenger recorded in cold, digital data. It had been standing behind him, a silent witness to his every broken, desperate word.

He was not suffering from oxygen deprivation. He was not going insane.

The horror was real. It was intelligent. It was patient.

And it was in the room with him right now.

Slowly, mechanically, as if his joints were rusted shut, he turned his head. His heart was a dull, heavy drum in his chest, counting down the seconds. He looked over his shoulder, his gaze sweeping toward the dark space by the bunk, the exact spot frozen on the screen.

It was empty.

Of course it was empty. It was a hunter. It didn't wait for its prey to look back.

But on the floor, precisely where the figure's feet had stood in the recording, was a single, glistening drop of black water. It shone like a malevolent eye in the dim blue light. It was not a memory. It was not a hallucination.

It was a trace. A calling card.

----

(A note from the author, transmitted from a very dark room):

Hmmm. My head is... loud.

I found myself talking to myself. Then to the mirror. Then to my pencil. Then to the table. Then to the fan humming in the corner.

Then...I realized I wasn't talking to the dark.

I was talking to someone in it.

If you understood any of that, you're one of us now. Adding this story to your library or leaving a comment is the only way to prove we're both still real.

Don't turn around.

— [MKI???????????????????@#@$@&#_@$@_@&#]